Advocating a Virtuous Voluntaryism

Daily Archives: November 3, 2012

A friend of mine in the Liberty movement, a software engineer named Aleksey Gurtovoy brought these to my attention. The first one is an election day issue. That’s November 6th. I offered to help spread the word. Any readers in Iowa? Regardless, you should all check these out. It’s these kind of things that really count. Local issues. And no doubt these are coming to a town near you. That is if they haven’t already come while you were sleeping.

As a rule, I advocate voting no on any new government spending, I don’t care what it is or what its for. I would be surprised if anyone who valued their own labor thought differently. But I guess they do exist. The informed ones are known as special interests. The uninformed ones are known as marginal voters.

And when, in addition to being something no one can afford, the new expense is for something that does more harm than good, there’s all the more reason to vote against it.

I’m no big fan of the ACLU. Mainly because civil libertarians are too broad and impure a faction. Now, I’m a civil libertarian, but too often that’s where their love of liberty stops, the civil realm. There are more civil libertarians out there that reject economic freedom than those that support it. How else would a silver-tongued demagogue like Obama be elected with 53% of the vote?* But politics makes strange bedfellows. As it does in this particular case. And I suspect that the Iowa ACLU is far less detestable than the national one or the California one as well.

Nonviolent offenses aren’t crimes. It’s simple, that’s all there is to it. Installing a red light traffic camera, in addition to being a waste of time and a distraction from far more heinous crimes, is tyrannical. The last thing the police state needs is another tool it can use to further its powers and trample our rights. Now I’m not saying that this is the end of the world. It pails in comparison to many other issues. But the principles are the same. You still think this is a petty issue? Tell that to the men who threw off King George III because they had to pay a little extra for tea and paper.

*Well, there is another good reason and that is that the Republican Party is a failure. Obama was a referendum on Bush and McCain as much as anything else.